DISGRACEFUL – QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 9:46 A.M. ET:  An excellent story about censorship in Vietnam, published in the Washington Post, begins this way, our quote of the day: 

Five years ago I began an experiment — not of my own devising — to study censorship in Vietnam. In 2009, I signed a contract to publish one of my books in Hanoi. Called “The Spy Who Loved Us,” the book tells the story of Pham Xuan An, Vietnam’s most celebrated journalist during the Vietnam War. (He ended his career as bureau chief for Time magazine in Saigon.) Only after the war did we learn that An had received a dozen military medals as a communist spy and served as North Vietnam’s deadliest secret weapon.

COMMENT:  Did you know about that?  I didn't.  But it tells us something – that the history of the Vietnam War is far from complete.  The idea that TIME's bureau chief in Saigon was a Red agent should sicken the profession of journalism, but probably won't.  Journalism, to use the imperative of the 60s generation, wants to "move on."

We won every major battle in Vietnam, but we lost the war.  The enemy's own official history, largely ignored in the United States, admits that they agreed to negotiations because their military situation had grown so precarious by the late 1960s.  But we lost the war.

For more than a generation the Vietnam War has been an open wound in this society.  We are given the conventional wisdom by the political class, that the war was a mistake and that we were defeated by a popular revolution.  Nonsense.  The troops that flooded into Saigon in 1975, as Americans fled in helicopters, were regular infantry and armor units of the army of North Vietnam.  There wasn't a "revolutionary" in sight.

Will we ever be given the full story?  Not likely.  The media is quick to admit little mistakes.  If it gets the spelling of a name wrong, it's corrected.  The big mistakes are buried as journalists proudly "stand by our story."  History is the loser.  So are veterans.

February 2, 2015